IBM Signs on For Small Business

Big Blue is expanding its single sign-on application to help smaller companies work with their partners.

IBM (Quote) is rolling out identity management software to
help small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) transact with the networks of
larger partners.

Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway allows employees of one company to log on to the network of an outside company without having to provide a user ID and password to the other network.

In addition to simplifying access, this also means that SMBs don't have to
worry about former employees using IDs and passwords granted by their
partners to gain unauthorized access.

The solution can also be used to integrate the services provided by a
smaller company onto a larger company's Web site.

For instance, a bank can allow a third-party financial services company to
provide niche services to its online banking customers seamlessly.

Customers would be able to interact with the niche vendor without having to
log in to the third-party site because it has been authenticated by the
bank's network.

The software is a new version of Big Blue's Federated Identity Manager
(FIM) and is based on SAML
(define), a key protocol for secure digital identity management within
Web-based transactions.

Venkat Raghavan, program director of security policy and compliance for IBM
Tivoli, explained that IBM designed the new application specifically for
SMBs by reducing both the complexity of the architecture and the cost.